Fact · Languages and accents
The LANGUAGES table in OpenAI's Whisper source code includes Arabic, with the code ar.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“"nl": "dutch", "ar": "arabic", "sv": "swedish", "it": "italian"”
whisper/tokenizer.py: the LANGUAGES table (openai/whisper), OpenAI, GitHub, openai/whisper, 2026, LANGUAGES dictionary.
Open the original- What it measures
- The entries are listed in the file as one code and one name per line, and this is the Arabic entry between Dutch and Swedish. The table is the list of languages the package can be asked to transcribe.
- What it does not show
- Being in the table does not show how accurate Whisper is in Arabic, and Arabic has several dialects that the single code does not separate. Apps built on Whisper may offer only some of them.